The Little Stranger (29 page)

I thought of how Rod himself had spoken on the night of the fire. I remembered him saying that he and his sister had disappointed his mother ‘simply by being born’. But her expression, now, was so anguished; and I had already told her so much. What good would it have done, to share that with her, too? So I took her hand again and said, very firmly, ‘You’re being fanciful. You’re ill, and tired. One upset summons up a crowd of others, that’s all it is.’

She looked into my face, wanting to believe me. ‘You really think so?’

‘I know so. You mustn’t brood on things from the past. The issue we’ve to deal with now is not what’s made Rod ill, but how we’re to get him well again.’

‘But suppose this is too deep a thing for that? Suppose he can’t be cured?’

‘Of course he can. You’re talking as though he’s beyond help! With proper care—’

She shook her head, beginning to cough again. ‘We can’t care for him here. We simply haven’t the strength for it, Caroline and I. Remember, we’ve been through this before.’

‘Then, perhaps a nurse?’

‘I don’t believe a nurse could cope with him!’

‘Oh, but surely—’

Her gaze moved from mine. She said as if guiltily, ‘Caroline told me you spoke of a hospital.’

I said, after a slight pause, ‘Yes. I hoped at one point to be able to persuade Rod to admit himself. The place I had in mind was a specialist private nursing home. For mental disorders, like this.’

‘Mental disorders,’ she repeated.

I said quickly, ‘Don’t let that phrase alarm you too much. It covers all sorts of conditions. The clinic is up in Birmingham, and quite discreet. But, well, it’s not cheap. Even with Rod’s disability pension I’m afraid the fees would be hefty. Perhaps, after all, a reliable nurse, here at Hundreds, would be the better option …’

She said, ‘I’m frightened, Dr Faraday. A nurse could only do so much. Suppose Roderick were to start another fire? Next time, perhaps, he’d succeed in burning the Hall to the ground, or in killing himself—or in killing his sister, or me, or one of the servants! Have you thought of that? Imagine what would follow! Inquiries, and policemen, and newspaper-men—all in earnest this time; not like that wretched business with Gyp. And what would become of him then? As far as anyone knows, this fire was an accident and Roderick had the worst of it. If we send him away now, we can say we’re simply sending him out of the Warwickshire winter in order for him to recover. Don’t you agree? I’m asking you now as our friend, as well as our doctor. Please help us. You were so good to us, before.’

I saw the sense in her words. I was very conscious that I had already dragged my heels over Roderick, with near-disastrous results. It could certainly do him no harm to get away from the estate for a while; I had wanted that for him from the start. And yet, there was a great deal of difference between encouraging him to admit himself to a clinic, and packing him off there by force.

I said, ‘It’s certainly an option. Naturally, I would have to bring in another man, get a second opinion. But we mustn’t act too hastily. As frightful as this incident has been, it may well have the effect of jolting him out of his delusion. I still can’t believe—’

‘You haven’t seen him yet,’ she whispered, across my words.

She had that odd look of Caroline’s. I said, after a moment, ‘No, not yet.’

‘Go and speak to him now, will you? Then come back and tell me your thoughts.—Just a second.’

I had risen, but she beckoned me back. And while I watched, she reached into the drawer of her bedside cabinet and took something from it. It was a key.

Reluctantly, I held out my hand.

T
he room they had put him in was the bedroom he’d had as an older child: the room, I suppose, in which he’d slept during his school holidays and, later, in his brief leaves from the Air Force, before his smash. It was just around the landing from his mother’s, separated from it only by her old dressing-room, and it was horrible to think of his having been in there all this time—horrible, too, to have to tap at his door and brightly call his name, and then, receiving no answer, put the key to the lock like a gaoler. I don’t know what I expected to find when I went in to him. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had come charging after his freedom. As I opened the door I remember I flinched, prepared for anger and abuse.

But what I found was, in a way, far worse. The curtains at the windows were half drawn, and the room was gloomy. It took me a moment to see that Rod was sitting in bed, in a pair of boyish striped pyjamas and an old blue dressing-gown, and instead of making a rush at the open door, he watched me approach, keeping very still. He had one hand at his mouth, the fingers made loosely into a fist; he was rapidly flicking at his lip with his thumb-nail. Even in the poor light and from a distance I could see how unwell he looked. Drawing closer, I made out the greasy yellowish-white of his face, and his swollen, sore-looking eyes. There seemed to be traces of soot, still, in the pores of his skin and in the oil of his unwashed hair. His cheeks were unshaven, the stubble growing patchily because of his scars; his mouth was pale, the lips drawn in. I was struck, too, by the
odour
of him: the odour of smoke and perspiration and sour breath. Under his bed was a chamber-pot, which had evidently recently been used.

He kept his eyes on my face as I approached, but didn’t answer when I spoke to him. Only when I sat beside him and opened my bag, and gently parted the lapels of his dressing-gown and pyjama top to put the stethoscope to his chest, did he break his silence. And what he said was, ‘Can you hear it?’

His voice had only a hint of hoarseness. I drew him forward to put the stethoscope to his back. ‘Hear what?’

His mouth was close to my ear. He said, ‘You know what.’

‘All I know is that, like your mother and sister, you breathed in a good deal of smoke the other night. I want to be sure it didn’t hurt you.’

‘Hurt me? Oh, it wouldn’t do that. It doesn’t want that. Not any more.’

‘Be quiet for a moment, will you?’

I moved the bulb. His heart was thumping and his chest was tight, but I could find no trace of stickiness or deadness in his lungs, so I settled him back against his pillow and refastened his clothes. He let me do it, but his gaze moved away, and soon he returned his hand to his mouth and started flicking again at his lip.

I said, ‘Rod, this fire has frightened everybody terribly. No one seems to know how it started. What do you remember? Can you tell me?’ He seemed not to be listening. ‘Rod?’

He gaze came back to mine and he frowned, growing almost peevish. ‘I’ve told everyone, already: I don’t remember anything. Just you being there, and then Betty coming, and then Caroline, putting me to bed. I had a dream, I think.’

‘What sort of dream?’

He was still flicking at his mouth. ‘Just a dream. I don’t know. What does it matter?’

‘You might have dreamed, say, that you got up. That you tried to light a cigarette or a candle.’

His hand grew still. He looked at me in disbelief. ‘You’re not trying to make out it was all an accident!’

‘I don’t know what to think, yet.’

He moved around in the bed, growing excited. ‘After all I’ve told you! Even Caroline can see it wasn’t an accident! There were lots of fires, she says. She says those other marks, in my room, they were little fires, too. Little fires that didn’t take.’

I said, ‘We don’t know that for sure. We may never know.’

‘
I
know. I knew, that night. I told you, didn’t I, that a trick was coming? Why did you leave me on my own? Couldn’t you see I wasn’t strong enough?’

‘Rod, please.’

But he was shifting around now as if he could hardly control his own movements. He was like a man with DT; it was terrible to see.

At last he reached for my arm and held on to it. ‘What if Caroline hadn’t come in time?’ he said. His eyes were blazing in his face. ‘The whole house might have burnt down! My sister, my mother, Betty—’

‘Come on, Rod. Calm down.’

‘Calm down? I’m practically a murderer!’

‘Don’t be foolish.’

‘That’s what they’re saying, aren’t they?’

‘No one’s saying anything.’

He twisted the sleeve of my jacket. ‘But they’re right, don’t you see? I thought I could keep this thing at bay, stop the infection. But I’m too weak. The infection’s been too long inside me. It’s
changing
me. It’s making me
like
it. I thought I was keeping it away from Mother and Caroline. But all this time it’s been working
through
me, as a way of getting at them. It’s been—What are you doing?’

I had drawn away from him to reach for my bag. He saw me bringing out a tub of tablets.

‘No!’ he cried, hitting out with his hand so that the tub went flying. ‘Nothing like that! Don’t you understand? Are you trying to help it? Is that what you’re doing? I mustn’t go to sleep!’

The blow of his hand against mine, and the obvious madness of his words and expression, frightened me. But I looked in anxiety at his swollen eyes and said, ‘You haven’t been sleeping? Not since the night before last?’ I took hold of his wrist. His pulse was still racing.

He pulled himself free. ‘How can I? It was bad enough before.’

‘But Rod,’ I said, ‘you must sleep.’

‘I daren’t! And you wouldn’t, either, if you knew what it was like. Last night—’ He lowered his voice, and glanced craftily about. ‘Last night I heard noises. I thought there was something at the door, something scratching, wanting to get in. Then I realised that the noise was
inside me
, that the thing that was scratching was inside me, trying to get
out
. It’s waiting, you see. It’s all very well them locking me in, but if I go to sleep—’

He didn’t finish, but looked at me with what he evidently thought was tremendous meaning. Then he drew up his knees, put his hands before his mouth, and went back to flicking at his lip. I left the bed, to gather up the pills that he had knocked from the tub to the floor; I found my hand was trembling as I did it, for I’d realised at last how deeply, deeply lost he was to his delusion. I stood up and looked helplessly at him, and then I gazed around the room, seeing tragic little tokens of the charming, lively boy he must once have been: the shelf of adventure books still on the wall, the trophies and models, the Air Force charts, with annotations added in an untidy teenage hand … Who ever could have predicted this decline? How had it happened? It seemed to me, suddenly, that his mother must be right: no amount of strain or burden could explain it. There had to be something else at the root of it, some clue or sign I could not read.

I returned to the bed, and looked into his face; but finally looked away, defeated. I said, ‘I have to leave you, Rod. I wish to God I hadn’t. Can I send Caroline to sit with you?’

He shook his head. ‘No, you mustn’t do that.’

‘Well, is there anything else I can do?’

He looked me over, considering. And when he spoke again his voice had changed, he was as polite and apologetic, suddenly, as the boy I had been picturing a few moments before. He said, ‘Let me have a cigarette, would you? I’m not allowed to, when I’m on my own. But if you stay with me while I smoke it, that’ll be all right, won’t it?’

I gave him a cigarette, and lit it for him—he wouldn’t do it with his own hands, and he screwed up his eyes and covered his face while I struck the flame—then I sat with him as, wheezing slightly, he smoked it through. When he had finished he gave me the stub, so that I could take it away with me. ‘You haven’t left your matches, by mistake?’ he asked anxiously as I rose again. I had to show him the box, and make a sort of pantomime of putting it back into my pocket, before he’d let me go.

And then, most poignantly of all, he insisted on coming to the door with me, to make sure that, after I left him, I locked it. I went twice, the first time to take his chamber-pot to the bathroom, where I emptied and rinsed it; but even for that short trip he insisted I turn the key on him, and when I returned I found him hovering on the other side of the door as if disturbed by the coming and going. Before I left the second time I took his hand—but again, the delay seemed only to agitate him, his fingers were lifeless in mine and his gaze slid nervously from my face. When I finally closed the door I did it very firmly, and turned the key with great deliberateness, so that there should be no mistake about it; but as I was walking quietly away I heard the creaking of the lock, and looked back to see the handle moving and the door shifting in its frame. He was making sure he couldn’t get out. The handle twisted two or three times in its socket before it was still. The sight of that, I think, upset me almost more than anything else.

I took the key back to his mother. She could see how shocked and distressed I was. We sat in silence for a moment, and then, in low, dismal voices, began to talk over the arrangements that must be made for taking him away.

I
t was a simple enough business, after all. I brought in David Graham first, to confirm that Rod was beyond ordinary medical help, and then the director of the clinic—a Dr Warren—came down from Birmingham to make his own examination, and to bring the necessary papers. This was on the Sunday of that week, four days after the night of the fire: Rod had gone sleepless all that time, violently refusing my attempts to sedate him, and had passed into a near-hysterical state which I think shocked even Warren. I didn’t know how he would take the news that we planned to commit him to what was effectively a psychiatric hospital; to my very great relief—but also, in a sense, to my dismay—he was almost pathetically grateful. Clutching desperately at Warren’s hand, he said, ‘You’ll watch me there, won’t you? Nothing will get out of me, if you’re watching. And even if it does, well, it won’t be my fault, will it, if something happens, if someone gets hurt?’

His mother was there in the room while he babbled on like this. She was still weak and very wheezy, but had risen and dressed in order to receive Dr Warren. Seeing how upset the sight of Roderick made her, I took her downstairs. We joined Caroline in the little parlour, and Warren came down to us a few minutes later.